{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/stable-memory-with-unstable-synapses","title":"Stable memory with unstable synapses","arxiv_id":"1808.00756","date":"2019-02-24","proceeding":null,"authors":[],"abstract":"What is the physiological basis of long-term memory? The prevailing view in\nneuroscience attributes changes in synaptic efficacy to memory acquisition.\nThis view implies that stable memories correspond to stable connectivity\npatterns. However, an increasing body of experimental evidence points to\nsignificant, activity-independent dynamics in synaptic strengths. Motivated by\nthese observations, we explore the possibility of memory storage within a\nglobal component of network connectivity, while individual connections\nfluctuate. We find a simple and general principle, stemming from stability\narguments, that links eigenvalues in the complex plane to memories.\nSpecifically, imaginary-coded memories are more resilient to noise and\nhomeostatic plasticity than their real-coded counterparts. Memory\nrepresentations are stored as time-varying attractors in neural state-space and\nsupport associative retrieval of learned information. Our results suggest a\nlink between the properties of learning rules and those of network-level memory\nrepresentations, and point at measurable signatures to be sought in\nexperimental data.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00756v3","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.00756v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"stable-memory-with-unstable-synapses","repo_url":"https://github.com/lsusman/stable-memory","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}